I recently installed gentoo on a thinkpad 560Z notebook, using an orinoco wireless card for networking. It's been working fine for a few weeks. Yesterday, I suddenly lost networking and couldn't get it back. When I boot, cardmgr no longer sees the card in the slot, so it never even gets to try to start networking. If I look at /var/run/stab, it says that both sockets are empty. In order to eliminate the possibility that it was a software or configuration problem I did this:

1. Swapped the orinoco for another 802.11b card (linksys) that was currently working in a machine.
2. Booted from the tomsrtbt from which I first installed (and which had automatically set up networking via a wired xircom PCMCIA NIC)

In both cases, nothing was detected in the PCMCIA slots. This is sounding like a hardware failure isn't it? The only think that would contradict this is that when I did the BIOS test of PCMCIA, it said it was ok. What other tests can I try?